Upon learning that the murder had taken place in San Antonio, Pratt said, “Well, that’s disappointing to hear, because I guess in the city people are rather more liberal than they are in the rest of the state, because if that had been attempted in a medium-sized city, the outcome could have been quite different.”

“Well, there probably could have been 25 people in that Amtrak station who could have pulled a weapon and blown this son-of-a-Michelle to hell,” Solomon replied, apparently a reference to the First Lady, whom he frequently makes a target of puerile jokes.

Last year, Pratt blamed the death toll in the mass shooting that critically wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords on the fact that it took place at “a Democrat town hall meeting of a Democrat representative” and Democrats “don’t necessarily, most of them, believe in carrying guns.” There was, in fact, a man with a gun at the scene who attempted to stop the shooter, but almost shot an innocent man.

Later in the conversation, Solomon blamed the murder on anti-white racism (a favorite theme of his), while his cohost “Chief” Steve Davis speculated that if the “race-baiter and race-agitator” Barack Obama “was not the president, this would not have happened.”

Prominent gun lobbyist Larry Pratt is doubling down on his insistence that members of Congress should have a “healthy fear” of being shot, lecturing a congresswoman who felt threatened by one of his group’s members that she just doesn’t understand the Constitution.

Right Wing Watch first reported Pratt’s comments in a March interview with radio host Bill Cunningham. Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America, told Cunningham that a member of his group had spoken to a congresswoman who told him, “you want to shoot me, don’t you.”

“Well, that’s probably a healthy fear for them to have,” Pratt said. “You know, I’m kind of glad that’s in the back of their minds. Hopefully they’ll behave.”

The quote made it into a recent profile of Pratt in Rolling Stone, where it caught the eye of Mark Kelly, whose wife, former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, was critically injured in an assassination attempt, and of Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who it turns out was the threatened congresswoman Pratt had been talking about.

Then, this week, Pratt doubled down, issuing an open letter to Maloney, a New York Democrat, claiming that she does not understand the Constitution and telling her once again that she “should do her job in constant trepidation” that she will be shot: “Should you attempt to disarm Americans the way the British crown tried 240 years ago, the same sovereign people who constituted this government using the cartridge box someday may need to reconstitute it, as clearly anticipated by the Declaration of Independence.”

You reported that the Capitol Police and House sergeant-at-Arms concluded that there was “nothing to be done,”[3] but since you apparently do not “get it,” allow me to explain the obvious. I have never encouraged, or even suggested, that anyone harm anyone. Rather, my speech was designed to educate citizens, and politicians, that it is the fact that Americans are armed that allows them to resist efforts to be dominated, intimidated, or controlled by politicians.

…

You should do your job in constant trepidation that:

* Should your constituents disapprove of your job performance, you will be publicly criticized from the soap box;

* Should you enact unconstitutional legislation in violation of your oath of office, you will be voted out via the ballot box;

* Should criminal charges be brought against Americans for crimes which are not authorized by the U.S. Constitution, these prosecutions will be nullified in the jury box; and

* Should you attempt to disarm Americans the way the British crown tried 240 years ago, the same sovereign people who constituted this government using the cartridge box someday may need to reconstitute it, as clearly anticipated by the Declaration of Independence.

…

Private ownership and skilled use of firearms is what enabled our country to gain its independence, and it is what continues to preserve our liberty. Someday, I hope that you study this aspect of the history of our great nation, that currently allows you to serve in the People’s House, and come to understand the great principles on which it was founded and continues to operate.

Earlier this year, we reported on Gun Owners of America director Larry Pratt’s response to hearing that Rep. Carolyn Maloney was afraid of getting shot by a member of his group.

“That’s probably a healthy fear for them to have,” Pratt said of members of Congress who fear assassination, in an interview with radio host Bill Cunningham. “You know, I’m kind of glad that’s in the back of their minds. Hopefully they’ll behave.”

This week, the quote made it into Rolling Stone’s great profile of Pratt’s career of extremism and caught the eye of Mark Kelly, whose wife Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was critically injured in an assassination attempt in 2011.

Understandably upset by Pratt’s comfort with threats of gun violence to members of Congress, Kelly issued statement yesterday urging lawmakers to reject contributions from GOA.

“No matter where you stand on policies that reduce gun violence, Larry Pratt’s view that our leaders should live in fear of gun violence is an affront to all responsible gun owners, Gabby and me included,” Kelly wrote.

“No candidate for office should accept the support of Larry Pratt’s organization again.”

Gilbert’s theory has been panned by traditional birthers, because it undermines their claim that Obama isn’t a natural-born U.S. citizen, but has taken off among those who are seeking other ways to question the president’s origins. It was most notably endorsed by Bill Armistead, the chairman of the Alabama Republican Party, who said in 2012 that he had seen Gilbert’s movie and “verified that it is factual, all of it.”

In his interview with “The Liberty Brothers Radio Show,” Pratt presented the Frank Marshall Davis theory as a plausible explanation for why Obama “hates” America.

“His father was either a Kenyan socialist or the Communist Party member who lived across the street, Frank Marshall Davis, and there’s a lot more physical resemblance between the latter and Obama than Obama Sr. and Obama,” he said.

Bringing up the conspiracytheory that Obama enrolled in school as a foreign student, Pratt said that while he doesn’t think the president is foreign-born — “I really think that more likely was that the communist that lived across the street in Hawaii could have been the father” — he does think Obama lied about being a foreign student to get financial aid.

Reporter Alexander Zaitchik digs into Pratt’s history of allying with anti-government militia groups and the anti-Semitic, racist Christian Identity movement. On the afternoon of the Oklahoma City bombing, Pratt implied that Timothy McVeigh had been doing God’s work against a government that was behaving “like a beast.”

Zaitchik also notes Pratt’s early forays into radical Religious Right activism, including calling for a quarantine of AIDS victims in the early days of the epidemic.

The whole profile is worth a read, but here are a few excerpts.

Along with his gun work, Pratt was involved during the Reagan years in a wide range of social and foreign policy issues. He was a member of the Council for National Policy, a think tank bringing together leading conservative figures to generate policy for the new administration. In 1980, he founded the Committee to Protect the Family Foundation, which raised money for anti-gay campaigns and assisted the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue with legal defenses. In 1986, during the depths of the AIDS crisis, Pratt bought ads around the country highlighting a D.C. law forbidding health insurance companies from denying coverage and raising rates for people who test positive for HIV. "We don't think AIDS should have civil rights," Pratt told the Los Angeles Times. "The law is a dangerous and outrageous precedent for other wacko legislators to follow. [Those who support it should be] held accountable for voting to support homosexual privileges."

The following year, Pratt called for the quarantine of people suffering from AIDS. "Our judges coddle criminals instead of caring for the victims of crime," he wrote in a Family Foundation fundraising letter. "They've chased God out of our schools, defended abortions…and now they are trying to infect us and kill us with strange and horrible diseases."

…

The bloodshed and the armed standoff [at Ruby Ridge] that followed catalyzed groups across the far right into action. This activity would soon produce a national militia movement for which Ruby Ridge functioned as a modern-day Alamo. The most important event in this development was a three-day meeting convened in October 1992 by Christian Identity leader Pete Peters. Christian Identity maintains that Aryans are the true Jews, that blacks are a pre-Adamic subhuman species, and that a race war is coming, after which whites will establish a "Christian government." These were the baseline ideas uniting the 150 far-right leaders who answered Peters' call to action at a YMCA hall in Estes Park, Colorado. Among those present was Larry Pratt. According to media reports, Pratt railed against the 14th Amendment and delivered one of his favorite lines: "The Second Amendment ain't about duck hunting."

According to Leonard Zeskind's report from the conference, published in a November 1995 Rolling Stone story, Pratt's fellow speakers consisted mostly of extremists with little mainstream profile or Washington connections, people like Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler and Texas Klansman Louis Beam. Pratt represented a link between these worlds and the rightward edge of the conservative establishment. Pratt's presence, wrote Zeskind, "signaled the transformation of the gun lobby. Organizations like GOA or even the National Rifle Association, which were devoted to the single issue of firearms, would become the leading edge of a far right, multi-issue assault on government institutions and democratic rights. The gun lobby would be at the center of a web of right-wing warriors."

…

In militia circles, the [Waco] siege confirmed the worst suspicions about the federal government. The links between the militia scene and the gun groups had deepened to the point where NRA fundraising letters echoed the language of extremist publications on the radical right. In one 1995 letter, NRA executive vice-president Wayne LaPierre described ATF officers as "jack-booted thugs" in "Nazi bucket helmets." But the NRA stopped short of supporting the Christian Identity lawyer Kirk Lyons, who was representing multiple victims of Waco. Pratt and the GOA had no such compunction and donated tens of thousands of dollars to Lyons's white supremacist organization CAUSE (short for the Aryan bastions of Canada, Australia, the United States, South Africa and Europe), "Not $50,000 — but a lot of money for us," Pratt told Rolling Stonein 1995.

For many, the gun scene's rhetoric of an "evil" and "fascist" government was immediately rendered in more sinister shades when Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb under Oklahoma City's Alfred P. Murrah federal building on April 19, 1995, the second anniversary of the Waco siege. Former president George W. Bush spoke for many when he cancelled his NRA membership in the bombing's wake, citing LaPierre's incendiary rhetoric.

On the afternoon of the City bombing, Pratt was in Washington, D.C., demonstrating in front of FBI headquarters for its role in the Waco tragedy. Three days later, Pratt spoke before a gathering of 600 Christian Identity adherents and assorted radicals convened by Pete Peters at the Lodge of the Ozarks in Branson, Missouri. Pratt addressed the "Biblical Mandate to Arm" and seemed to justify McVeigh's act of terror, at the time the bloodiest in American history. According to an account by Michael Reynolds in Playboy, Pratt told the gathered, "The government behaves as a beast. It did in Waco, and we have somebody, whoever it might have been, whatever group it might have been, assuming they can't rely on the Lord to take vengeance."

Gun Owners of America executive director Larry Pratt is furious about Hillary Clinton’s recent remark that the gun lobby is a “minority of people” who “hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority of people.”

Pratt told Tea Party News Network host Tim Constantine on Tuesday that Clinton’s remark means she thinks that all gun owners are terrorists and is therefore ignoring Islamic terrorism, which he claimed is being taught in “most of the mosques in our country.”

“That means that they’re not willing to look at Islam and realize that Islam teaches killing other people,” he said. “Pure Islam from the Koran says that anybody who doesn’t agree exactly with Islam is to be killed, or enslaved at best. So, there’s your real terrorist. And it’s in most of the mosques in our country. You want to find the real terrorists, Mrs. Clinton, check out mosques.”

Jones asked Pratt about a Washington Times report about a 2010 Pentagon directive — an update to a series of similar directives crafted under previous administrations — outlining how and when the military can use force to quell domestic unrest “in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the president is impossible.”

Jones, of course, read this to mean that it is “official and has been confirmed” that the military is “training with tanks, armored vehicles, drones” to “take on the American people, mainly the Tea Party.”

“Well, he’s certainly not thinking that Muslims are a threat,” responded Pratt, “so he’s turning to his political opponents, declaring that they’re the enemy and ignoring the fact that Muslims from time to time have a tendency to go ‘boom.’”

Pratt then cited the 2009 DHS report to claim that the Obama administration has “fingered veterans as potential terrorists, people who believe in the Second Amendment, who are pro-life, who want to work for limited government.”

“I guess the idea of limited government really would terrorize a socialist,” he said, adding, “The enemy is freedom and they really are doing what they can to extinguish it.”

Late last month, Gun Owners of America director Larry Pratt and Andrew Mangione of the Association of Mature American Citizens gave us an interesting peak into the internal fighting within the GOP.

In a May 31 conversation on Pratt’s Gun Owners Radio Hour, the two conservative activists agreed on many things — including a visceral hatred of the Affordable Care Act and a fear that President Obama will send “goon squads” after people who fail to report gun ownership to their insurance companies. (Mangione’s group was founded as a conservative alternative to the AARP after the AARP got behind the health care reform).

But things got contentious when Pratt brought up his frequently-expressed anger at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who he thinks hasn’t done enough to obstruct President Obama , and declared, “If I lived in Kentucky, I’ll tell you right now, I’d vote for the liberal Democrat just to get rid of Mitch McConnell out of leadership in the Republican Party, where he does so much damage,” adding, “he is poison, pure and simple.”

Mangione, aghast, responded, “So you’d rather lose the seat than have a Republican, regardless of how pure he is on the conservative scale.”

“You’d rather have the seat go to a Democrat, you’d rather give the seat to the people who brought you Obamacare because of your personal dislike of this Republican?” he continued. “That’s why we got Obamacare, that’s why we got another four years of Obama. You’re talking crazy, sir, with all due respect.”

Pratt responded that “Mitch McConnell is the reason we got Obamacare,” to which Mangione replied that McConnell successfully denied health care reform a single Republican vote in the Senate and gave the GOP an election issue that has lasted for years.

According to Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America, the unhinged, misogynist manifesto written by Elliot Rodger before he killed six people and himself in a mass shooting outside of Santa Barbara “reflects the thinking of a person like our president.”

In an interview last week with Stan Solomon, the GOA executive director reacted to Rodger's shooting spree the way he reacts to every mass shooting – by finding anything to blame other than guns.

Solomon ripped into Richard Martinez, who criticized the NRA after losing his son in the shooting, calling the bereaved father a “stupid son of a bitch” and asking “what the hell is wrong with you?” Mistakenly thinking that Martinez lost a daughter in the shooting, he added, “If you had taught your daughter how to have and use a weapon, she might still be alive.”

Pratt responded by blaming Rodger’s lack of a “traditional kind of family life” for the shooting, adding, “I think that the parents deserve a lot of the credit slash blame for bringing up a son like that.” (Pratt has also blamed Trayvon Martin’s death on his “broken family”).

A Second Amendment advocate has a theory about why the U.S. Department of Agriculture is buying body armor and submachine guns.

Mike Hammond, legislative council to Gun Owners of America, says it follows a pattern of other federal agencies that seem to be preparing for war – against us.

"We suspect that the federal government is anticipating and preparing for confrontation with American citizens," he says, wondering aloud if President Obama is preparing for a dictatorship.

"What are the characteristics of a dictatorship?" Hammond asks rhetorically. "An individual who is bound not by the law, but by his own desires and his own goals. And that may be where we are now."

In an online story with more than 6,000 comments, Breitbart.com reported that the USDA put in a solicitation for lightweight submachine guns on May 7.

…

Still, Hammond wonders if the USDA closely watched the Cliven Bundy confrontation, when armed American citizens faced off against Bureau of Land Management agents in Nevada in past weeks.

The Department of Agriculture, like many federal agencies, has an investigative and law enforcement division. Agents of the DOA’s investigative division have since 1981 [pdf] had the authority to “conduct investigations of significant criminal activities involving USDA programs, operations, and personnel, and are authorized to make arrests, execute warrants, and carry firearms.”

These law enforcement divisions – which can be the subject of an honest debate that GOA is clearly not interested in having – have been growing steadily since the 1970s, long before Obama was president.

South Carolina State Sen. Lee Bright, who’s vying to defeat U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham in next month’s Republican primary was a pioneer in this year’s trend of conservative candidates giving away guns as campaign gimmicks. Back in January, Bright’s campaign raffled off an AR-15. And today, Bright’s supporters will get the opportunity to win a handgun…with the extra bonus of hearing a speech from Gun Owners of America director and Bright endorser Larry Pratt.

In an April 26 interview with Gun Owners for America director Larry Pratt, Shea compared the fringe element supporting Bundy to the American colonists who revolted against Britain. He added that when it comes to the Bundy situation, Americans are divided between “patriots and loyalists”: “Are you a loyalist or are you a patriot? Are you a god-fearing, self-reliant, freedom-loving American, or are you a government-dependent, Constitution-ignoring socialist?”

“I don’t think it’s hyperbole or exaggeration to compare this to colonial America,” he said.

Pratt: I’m not sure it’s all that much different from what it was in colonial America, when our forefathers drew their line in the sand and fought off the world’s most powerful empire. The estimates that I’ve read of historians that have really done some digging is that maybe three percent were actively involved in the war for independence. Maybe another 10 percent, if I remember their guesstimates correctly, at least supported materially in some way –‘Use my pasture over there, you can take those crops over there,’ whatever they might have done to help. Then there was a body of opinion that was kind of undecided and there was another body, a small body probably, that was pro-Tory, pro-king. Maybe we’re not that much different than that estimated line of public opinion in colonial America.

Shea: I really don’t think we are. And I agree with the statement, you know, between three to five percent of the population is what gets actively involved to stand on that line, and then there’s just another huge swath of the population that will, you know, offer material support.

And I’ve been talking to folks recently about what really happened in Nevada, and I’ve really framed the question this way, which I think is the second thing that really relates to colonial America, and that is very simply: Are you a loyalist or are you a patriot? Are you a god-fearing, self-reliant, freedom-loving American, or are you a government-dependent, Constitution-ignoring socialist? And we really have to make that decision as individuals throughout the country.

And that’s really, I think, where we’re at and why I don’t think it’s hyperbole or exaggeration to compare this to colonial America.

Deace shared his theory that that public-sector unions are one of the “four pillars of the leftist, statist, Marxist movement,” along with “the child-killing industry, the homosexual lobby” and “government education” (which is “how they get the next generation to indoctrinate them”).

He praised Walker for removing “one of the four pillars,” namely “the worker bees, the grassroots, the mobocracy, the ‘Hail Satan’ chanters down in Texas last year, that’s the government-sector employee unions.” Deace apparently thinks that five anonymous teenagers yelling “hail Satan” at a pro-choice protest in Texas means that all public employees are Satanists.

Deace counseled Republicans against supporting any GOP politician who supports any one of the “four pillars.”

Pratt agreed, adding that the public-sector employees, including teachers’ unions, that protested at the Wisconsin state capitol in 2011 were “such ugly, dirty people” that nobody would want teaching their children.

Deace: There are four pillars of the leftist, statist, Marxist movement in America: the child-killing industry, the homosexual lobby, government education – that’s sort of their youth ministry, that’s how they get the next generation to indoctrinate them. The homosexual lobby and the abortion industry is where they get their mega, mega hundreds of millions to fund their schemes. But the worker bees, the grassroots, the mobocracy, the ‘Hail Satan’ chanters down in Texas last year, that’s the government-sector employee unions. And if you cut them off, that’s like cutting off the recruiting ability of a college football team. That’s the lifeblood of their program is those government-sector employee unions.

And if you do some of the math, I think the average annual union due in Wisconsin is like $1,500 a year for an AFSCME member. And if they truly lost 40,000 members, Larry, 40,000 times 1,500, you can pretty much buy the Wisconsin state government every year for that kind of money. And to have him cut off the head of the snake like that, he removed one of the four pillars. He’s maybe the only elected Republican in my lifetime I can think of who’s actually removed one of their pillars. And now you know why they have done everything they can possibly do to get rid of him.

And I would just say to your audience, if you’re supporting a Republican who doesn’t threaten at least one of those pillars, you’re wasting your time. If you’re supporting a Republican who aids and abets or collaborates with one of those four pillars, I don’t care how good he is on every other issue, he’s actually working for your opponent. Because that’s the infrastructure of the American left, those four facets.

…

Pratt: When Scott Walker had those union thugs lying all over the lobby of the capitol dome, the capitol building itself, they were such ugly, dirty people. ‘Those were teaching my kids?,’ I think people might have been thinking. They lost so much stature, it was just amazing what was happening.

So we can’t really say that it’s a surprise that when Alaska Republican Joe Miller – the Tea Party candidate endorsed by Sarah Palin in 2010 – launched his second Senate campaign yesterday, he chose Gun Owners of America to help kick things off.

Miller’s launch event in Wasilla prominently featured a speechby Tim Macy, Gun Owners of America’s vice chairman, who the Alaska Dispatch reported “said his staff has been tracking Miller for years without his knowing it, in order to determine if he’s a true believer in gun rights and protecting the Second amendment.”

As we noted last week, in any reasonable political party, GOA would be politically toxic given the views that its director, Larry Pratt, frequently shares in media appearances on behalf of the organization. For instance, shortly after a gunman killed 12 people at a movie theater in Colorado in 2012, GOA sent out a press release implying that it could have been an inside job. And there's more:

That Larry Pratt is an influential Republican lobbyist who is regularly quoted by mainstream news sources shows that it is basically impossible to be too extreme to be taken seriously in today’s right wing.

After all, back in 1996, Pratt was too extreme for even Pat Buchanan. Pratt stepped down from his role in Buchanan’s presidential campaign after his ties to white supremacists and promotion of the right-wing militia movement came to light. As Southern Poverty Law Center director Morris Dees said at the time, “He's got one foot in that far-right fringe and another foot in mainstream Washington, which makes him really dangerous."

That certainly hasn’t changed. In just the past couple of years, Pratt

Gun Owners of America executive director Larry Pratt is one of those people we wish we could ignore. Every interview he gives devolves into a mess of anti-government conspiracy theories, thinly veiled racism, and good-guy-with-a-gun revenge fantasies. This puts him at around the extremism level of 9/11 truther Alex Jones and unhinged Internet newscaster Stan Solomon…both of whom regularly host Pratt on their programs.

But we can’t ignore Larry Pratt because, as we are reminded every few weeks, he remains one of the country’s most influential gun lobbyists. Today’s reminder of this unsavory fact came from the New York Times’ report on Michael Bloomberg’s plan to spend $50 million promoting gun safety laws this year. The NRA declined to comment, so the Times called the second best option: Larry Pratt.

“He’s got the money to waste,” Mr. Pratt said of Bloomberg. “So I guess he’s free to do so. But frankly, I think he’s going to find out why his side keeps losing.”

It was also the New York Times that reported last year that Gun Owners of America was “emerging as an influential force” in the effort to defeat new gun laws. The Times quoted Sen. Ted Cruz praising GOA, noting that Cruz was the group’s “key ally in the Senate.” (Pratt, for his part, returnsthe praise every chance he gets).

In the past year, Pratt has appeared on CNN and MSNBC. And just a few months ago, when Fox News Sunday hosted Gabrielle Giffords’ husband Mark Kelly to speak on the anniversary of the Sandy Hook shooting, they decided that Larry Pratt would be the perfect person to join him with an opposing view.

That Larry Pratt is an influential Republican lobbyist who is regularly quoted by mainstream news sources shows that it is basically impossible to be too extreme to be taken seriously in today’s right wing.

After all, back in 1996, Pratt was too extreme for even Pat Buchanan. Pratt stepped down from his role in Buchanan’s presidential campaign after his ties to white supremacists and promotion of the right-wing militia movement came to light. As Southern Poverty Law Center director Morris Dees said at the time, “He's got one foot in that far-right fringe and another foot in mainstream Washington, which makes him really dangerous."

That certainly hasn’t changed. In just the past couple of years, Pratt

On VCY America’s Crosstalk last week, Gun Owners of America executive director Larry Pratt agreed with a caller who said that unarmed teachers who protect students during school shootings aren’t heroes.

“When you see these stories on the news about teachers, and they’re saying they’re heroes because they’re running and hiding and locking doors and everything, and that’s supposed to be a heroic act. I think it’s sheer terror,” the caller complained.

“I’d rather they be a hero with a good shot,” Pratt agreed.

Earlier in the program, Pratt said that gun laws are only rational “if you want to be a dictator.”

“For those who are not thinking as totalitarians, gun control otherwise is not rational,” he said. “Now, if you want to be dictator, gun control is very rational. Like Hitler said, we’d have to be crazy to let the conquered people have guns. And crazy is one thing I don’t think he was. So, he understood that, but we apparently can’t think even as clearly as that monster.”

Gun Owners of America director Larry Pratt, who previously claimed that liberals were happy about the Boston Marathon bombing, said in an interview last week that the “gun control crowd” “privately rejoice” at events like the Sandy Hook massacre.

When a caller told Pratt, who was a guest on VCY America’s Crosstalk on Thursday, that he thought the Sandy Hook shooting “stinks of a conspiracy,” Pratt responded that “the gun control crowd” are “opportunistic.”

“My guess is that privately they rejoice when something like this happens,” he added. “Because they immediately go to their buddies in the media and they immediately start shedding their crocodile tears, pushing for more gun control.”

Later in the interview, a caller asked whether President Obama wants to impose martial law on the United States. Pratt agreed that he probably did but that the military wouldn’t follow the order.

That led the show’s host, Vic Eliason, to ask, “Is there an effort to generate chaos so that martial law would step in?”

Pratt responded, “I guess it’s a possibility because we know the president is a dyed-in-the-wool socialist, he’s going to fundamentally transform the country, and he’s been doing quite a job toward that. But I just don’t think that he would have the means to carry that out.”

During an interview yesterday with WorldNetDaily’s Radio America, Gun Owners of America head Larry Pratt said that “the revolt is underway” against Connecticut’s bipartisan gun safety laws. He added that his group is encouraging gun owners and police officers to refuse to comply with or enforce the law, and is supporting primary challengers to “RINOs” in the Connecticut state legislature who backed the new laws.

Pratt, who recently claimed that politicians should have a “healthy fear” of being shot, said later in the interview that people are “prepared to go to jail” to resist the gun safety regulations. “If you get so many tens of thousands of people saying that [they won’t comply], it becomes rather difficult to imagine how that can happen, especially if there aren’t any police around to arrest them in the beginning,” he said.

Pratt, who has links to white supremacists and is an apartheid apologist, even compared such gun activists to Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks: “I think it’s an American’s right to exercise his conscience, he has to be prepared to take the consequences. Just like Martin Luther King, he exercised his conscience, and Mrs. Parks sat down right in the front of the bus, now she was taken off the bus and escorted away and I think she was put in jail for a bit, so she was prepared to take the consequences. But she had decided ‘no more,’ and the people of Connecticut I think are in the same frame of mind.”

Gun Owners of America director Larry Pratt has been one of the drivers of the smear campaign against Vivek Murthy, President Obama’s nominee for surgeon general, who has earned the ire of GOA and the NRA for daring to suggest that gun safety is related to public health.

One of the gun groups’ beefs with Murthy is that his group, Doctors for America, opposed Florida’s NRA-backed gag rule preventing physicians from asking patients about gun ownership in order to talk with them about firearm safety.

In an interview with WorldNetDaily yesterday, Pratt claimed that doctors who talk to their patients about gun safety are in fact reporting the information to the government like “German and Soviet doctors would send to the regime information about the people that were in their care.”

Murthy’s opposition to the gag rule, Pratt declared, “shows that he does not understand medical ethics,” is a “willing tool of the state” and “looks at himself as a government functionary before he considers anything about medicine.”

Later in the interview, Pratt insisted that such information from doctors would somehow end up in a national database and be hacked by a 14-year-old because “once you put information on a computer, then it’s anybody’s game” and “grandchildren are particularly adept at computers.”

WND: What is the greatest concern about this potential nomination? Is it the fact that he’s encouraging doctors to find out information on the Second Amendment usage of their patients, or is there more to it than that?

Pratt: His urging that particular policy shows that he does not understand medical ethics. That is such a question so far outside of anything to do with medicine, that it shows that he’s a willing tool of the state, even as German doctors and Soviet doctors would send to the regime information about the people that were in their care. This is an extremely alarming attitude. This guy clearly looks at himself as a government functionary before he considers anything about medicine.

…

WND: Let’s say the doctors did feel pressure to ask the questions to the patients about whether they own firearms and if so what kind of usage they participate in. What happens if that kind of information is collected?

Pratt: Once you put information on a computer, then it’s anybody’s game. I mean, grandchildren are particularly adept at computers. I would say a 14-year-old would be able to obtain that data no matter what.

Speaking with Cincinnati radio host Bill Cunningham on Sunday, Gun Owners of America director Larry Pratt delightedly told a second-hand story about of a member of his group lobbying a congresswoman, who reportedly told the GOA member, “You want to shoot me, don’t you.”

Pratt said he didn’t think this man actually wanted to shoot the congresswoman, but added, “that’s probably a healthy fear for them to have.”

“You know, I’m kind of glad that’s in the back of their minds,” he said. “Hopefully they’ll behave.”

Cunningham: Larry Pratt of Gun Owners, why does the media have such a bias against the Second Amendment?

Pratt: They, I think they might understand what it’s real purpose is. And its real purpose is to serve as a restraint on government abuse. And since they want to be involved in government abuse, they kind of take it personally, I think. The Second Amendment is intended for people just like them – or perhaps we could say, like Piers Morgan – those who were born to rule and we were born to be ruled. And for us to have guns kind of upsets that order of things that they think ought to be. So I think they take it very personally.

I was told of a conversation that one of our members had had with a member of Congress. And he was lobbying on a gun issue, but he was, I knew the guy well enough to know that almost certainly he was mild-mannered, he was just explaining our position. And apropos of nothing, the congressman – congresswoman, actually – said, ‘You want to shoot me, don’t you.’

Well, that’s probably a healthy fear for them to have, even though that’s not the guy’s – he wasn’t saying anything about that, it wasn’t in his demeanor. But you know, I’m kind of glad that’s in the back of their minds. Hopefully they’ll behave.